Australia is the driest continent on earth, yet Australian's are the highest water users in the world. Australia is one of the biggest exporters of water through its exporting of meat, particularly beef. Each kilogram of beef requires up to 50,000 litres of water to produce. We have no black water recycling even though numerous other 1st world countries have been recycling black water for decades. Grey water recycling is considered a relatively new idea in Australia and has been implemented infequently. Australia is continually drought stricken. In Australia, we are very unwise with our water and it is running out. It may not be long before Australia is virtually uninhabitable and Australian's may soon become a burden on our South pacific neighbours as we increasingly become environmental refugees.

Stamford University

In the early 1990's, for only a brief period, Stamford University began exploring water structures. By pumping water into polypropylene bags the designers could create surprisingly efficient, gothic like structures. As water also provides a lot of thermal mass, these structures were also extremely thermally efficient. The polypropylene bags could be formed in a huge variety of organic shape and sizes. They could be rolled up and easily transported to anywhere in the world where, on adequate footings, they could be pumped full of water. They were some of the quickest and easiest structures to be built.

POOP house

No matter which way you look at it, building a house is never green. It takes vast quantities of materials with high levels of embodied energy and water and it creates a lot of waste. Even houses constructed from recycled materials often have an incredibly high embodied energy to implement. So we at Andrew Maynard Architects asked ourselves "what's the greenest building" and we concluded that the answer was "no building at all". But rather than be nihilistic about it we decided that a house should build itself through a lengthy period of assembling house hold waste. Through adopting similar structural logic employed at Stamford University the Poop house is a water structure that, over time, takes all household bio-waste, including human excrement and food, and slowly constructs the walls and roof.